WATCHING MIRRORS ON A CATWALK

WATCHING MIRRORS ON A CATWALK

Watching mirrors on a catwalk

but none of them interest me.

Disembodied as a play without a stage

it takes time to know where to stand.

I take my heavy winter boots off

like two starless nights. The smoke

is wiser than the candle, but who cares?

Looking for the pure space, the little white square

the shrink told me she discovered

at the centre of my heart like an albino sunspot

but no one was there. Excruciating solitude.

Times, I swear, even death feels lonely.

Comes from looking at too many stars.

Looking for an intimacy so deep within the abyss

it turns me inside out like the eyelids of an orange

without wedging the full moon apart into segments.

The peers of my high school annual predicted

I was mostly likely to become a mad teacher,

a mad scientist, a mad poet, mad. Four careers

and I’m retroactively mastering the last.

It’s haunted me like the Sibyl of Cumae for lightyears.

I thought if I pushed the envelope

people would receive it as a kind of loveletter.

Peace in your soul you can always

live it like a dream when the craziness

gets out of hand but I was a firestorm

of sidereal insights in a lighthouse

built like an obelisk on lunar quicksand.

Sometimes you’re better off at sea

than landing with high hopes for your lifeboats

on some coasts. Wasn’t sure if mine were among them,

but why take a chance? I warned people away from me.

There were happier islands you could be washed up on.

Strange the life I’ve been living like a quixotic crusade

against all ideas and forms of art that lack compassion,

breaking up continents like loaves of bread

for the ugly ducklings and the mysterious black swans

that move through the water like the reflections

of total eclipses, just to diversify the species of my solitude.

Poetry has made a thematic habit of my discontinuity.

At the top of every totem pole I’ve ever carved

out of the forests of Vancouver Island I was raised in,

there’s a hidden nightbird with its wings folded

like a black dove perched on the axis mundi of my serpent fire.

The songs I sing can’t be rehearsed by a choir.

Spontaneity keeps me from looking like a liar

in the eyes of the stars when they overhear me talking to myself.

Crazy wisdom. Bright vacancy. Dark abundance.

You’ve got to keep saying yes, yes, yes, to the light,

to the dark, to life, to love, to solitude, grief, despair

and all their attendant transformations if you want to stay sincere.

Visions of life. The twenty seven year old hooker

so strung out on cocaine in the bank robber’s house

where there wasn’t so much as a spoon or a fork or a plate,

she was a black, aniconic madonna of pain,

the paint rag of a thousand fantasies from fairy dust

to snakepits, none of them her own.

The coke white blankness of a bright vacancy

enslaving her dark abundance like shadows at noon.

The crone of her infancy, a withered spring.

I’ve been holding back my tears like an ice-age ever since.

Life can be as cold as an exacto knife as often

as it lets you feel its wisdom ripening like an apple

in the sunset just as the air is beginning to cool off

from labouring so intensely all day at minding flowers and the stars,

by God, the stars are distilled from a thousand lovers’ eyes.

The syrinx selects its own song when nobody’s using it.

And I’d rather fail, throwing my voice like a sparrow

against a windowpane keeping me from the sky

until it breaks and I’m grounded at the roots

of the prima donnas of the cosmos in their ballet slippers

dancing on the wind. Say it all in one big-hearted metaphor

like the roar of a dragon with a compassionate heart,

so that every poem I ever wrote was a fleet of lifeboats

flying the skull and crossbones like a shepherd of wolves

that knew how to howl at the moon like smoke from a distant fire

and I was poet enough to know that madness

is just another form of prayer. Be that. Without compromise.

Rather than disrespect my life and art by taking notes.

If you’re making a gift of a gift don’t call it a sacrifice.

Still within you, I swear, my gun-shy brother,

my reticent sister, despite all your wary attempts

to the contrary, there resides a jewel,

and you can call me a fool if you want,

a star sapphire, let’s say, because that’s my birth stone

and I had one once that was given to me by a lover,

a radiance like white phosphorus starclusters

that burns through everything from children’s skin

to the comets of kelp rinsing their hair in the tide

as they root their eyes in starmud like black ribbons

undone on a gift of life, or streamers on a girl’s first bike.

This jewel cuts through the void like a scalpel of starlight.

It’s an intimacy with your own awareness that leaves

everybody standing at the gate a stranger to themselves.

This is that homespun genius that makes its own clothes

like the moon to cover its nakedness in raiments of light

and takes in everybody under the cloak of its eclipse

like the leather yurt of a dragon giving shelter to birds

that are afraid of the lightning under its fireproof wings.

This is the labour of a lifetime spent on the flash of a firefly.

This is the lantern you’ve carried before you for lightyears

like a nightwatchman into the dark to see if there was

anyone else there who was as scared as you were to find out.

This is the work that taught you to be just as fulfilled

by what you failed at as you were empty

when they handed you a fictitious award.

And you knew immediately what a long way back it was

to the anonymous sixties when you were insignificant enough

to get some real work done and you weren’t famous

for the way you worship everything under the sun.

The uniqueness of your eyes might evaporate

like snowflakes of dry ice with the fragrance

of cornflowers tossed into a grave like the sad, longing

in the afterthoughts of a Neanderthal mother,

but your seeing, not what your looking at,

is as ageless and unperishing in its formlessness as ever.

And though you might have changed the covers

from pulp to hardback sometime in the early Cambrian,

none of your emotions and many yet to come

that have been left unthumbed like the novels of friends,

have grown any older under the carapaces

of your prophetic skulls trying to balance

the lunacy of a spare harvest moon on your head

while you’re crossing an exhausted suspension bridge.

Like I said, I don’t need to make a choir out of my voice

to listen to the sacred syllables whispering

in the autumn aspen trees to know there’s something sacred

in the silence that follows the wind isn’t revealing

like a poem that wasn’t written to be overlooked or not.

I’ve lapped the marrow from the broken koans

in the terrible lairs of the gods, and I’ve sung

the dead up out of the coffins of the sunflowers

knowing they’d look back eventually at their own shadows

but it might prove crucial to the state of their afterlives

that someone who loved them at least gave it a good try.

Magnificent the life within you, isn’t it? The way

its freedom never gets caught in any sudden squall

of golden chains you might want to weigh it down with

like the spiritual bling of maidens of the mist with rainbows

to dazzle the eyes of the blind into believing what they hope for?

Kids and wives, divorces like horrible vacations,

lovers that painted their nails in blood like razorblades,

brute dung heaps who snarled like distempered carnivores

under a heavy snowfall, forgetting no real shepherd of wolves

would be caught dead in sheep’s clothing. Disappointment

turned out to be more of a perennial than a one night stand.

You began to understand why God bewails human ingratitude.

And it was the folly of common sense when you were paranoid

to close your eyes like the granite crypt of your afterlife

against the superstitious shadows of the approaching grave-robbers.

You brought it all with you. Did you really think

you could leave it behind like a dogstar

you tried to ditch in the country to give it

some chance of spiritual survival like a fire in the wild

that could live off the land without it following you

like a return journey for the rest of your forsaken way?

It’s not that wonderful, heart-thawing, mystical acts

of human compassion have stopped happening

like oxygen and fire breaking into tears, it’s just

the turn of the miracles to lose their faith in us

like the hurt feelings of beautifully rejected lovers.

Something about the way love bonds both sides

of an open wound as wide as an expanding universe

like a maternal welder kissing our injuries into stronger scars.

Zen cracks in a teacup mended with gold.

Stop trying to sift through the middens of your past

like an archaeological dig in the starfields

you were trying to build an on ramp to the Road of Ghosts in,

and when you’re woken up in the small hours of the morning

by the dead who’ve got nothing but time on their hands

until dawn, and they ask you what you were dreaming

don’t answer like a seance addressing yourself to their absence.

Sometimes you just have to leave some things unburied

in the Valley of the Kings and Queens and move on

to second-guessing the tumblers like habitable planets

in possible solar systems like ours on the locks

of the stargates of Orion that will know you by the way you knock

not by the junkyard of sacred relics you’ve been hoarding.

If you dump your own redundancy, you’ll travel a lot lighter.

If you don’t forget the hidden jewel within you

has long had a place among the stars, whose eyes

I ask you, even after all these seeing nights and lightyears

of peering through a glass darkly, a candle in a lantern

released like a firefly to find its way home, could shine

any brighter than the waterstars and starmud of yours are now?

PATRICK WHITE